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Blog in the classroom
So my little experiment is running for one month now. I'll recall what it's all about: I set up a blog for my father to use in one of his classes. The group exists of nine students. The age of the students is approximately 16 and they're educated in five years to go to colleges of higher education (for the Dutch: HAVO). The group that uses the weblog is in it's fourth year, the pre-exam year. The subject for the blog is mathematics.
The way the blog is used: the teacher has published an algebra problem that needs to be solved in a number of steps. It is the task of the students to collectively come up with a solution for the problem. Their participation on the blog will be taken into account for grading, as well as the quality of their solutions.
Before the students started to use the blog I asked them to fill out a questionnaire about the way the normally to their homework and their expectations of this experiment. Here's a quick summary of the students' answers:
So far the results from the questionnaire. In a few conversations with my father I asked him about his observations on the experiment. I'll sum them up:
I'm interested whether the last two observations will change during the year. It is obvious that the students are not used to collaborative working. They do their homework alone and there is one-sided communication during the classes. The teacher tells them what the solutions should have been. There is not much of a dialogue between students about the things they learn. It would be interesting to see whether it is the case for all subjects in school, but on the questionnaire they all say that they do all their homework alone.
At the end of December I will have a group discussion with the students in order to get more input from the students. The outcomes of that discussion will be published here. Let me know if you have any questions or remarks regarding this experiment!
Meet Karsten
In Umea I met Karsten Kneese. He started out blogging, or rather keeping an on-line diary for his family and friends, when he moved all the way to northern Sweden. During BlogWalk I explained to him what in my view is blogging: invoking conversation. Originally he didn't have comment and trackback functionality, but after our conversations in Umea he switched to another platform with all the correct blogging tools, including RSS. I could only say welcome to the real blogging world, Karsten!
Meeting Dutch bloggers
Last monday Ton and I joined the edubloggers dinner in Utrecht. To me this was the first time of meeting Dutch bloggers (now that I think of it it's the second time since two Dutch blogging students joined us in Umea). Anyway, it was nice to talk in Dutch about blogging for a change. Usually I meet in an international setting where English is required. Somehow my English blogging vocabulary is more developed than my Dutch, resulting in speaking 'Dunglish' often.
Now you may wonder why I'm meeting educational bloggers. First of all I started out studying Educational Design, Management & Media for one year before switching to Communication Studies. My goal was Communication Studies, but you needed a first-year exam to get into the program. Therefore I chose to do my first year in EDMM. I liked my first year a lot, but thought that focusing on education was a bit to narrow for me and stuck with my choice of doing Communication Studies. However I always felt connected to educational issues. That probably is the main reason for me to do this little experiment with a blog in the classroom. It connects my expertise on communication tools like weblogs with my affinity with education. Together with the start of a foundation regarding innovative education and research I thought it would be a good opportunity to meet with other people interested in new communication tools and involved in educational research. A very fruitful setting for good conversations on blogging and already I'm invited to write about my experiment involving blogs in the classroom for a magazine. Meeting f-t-f works out again!
The people that were there:
Pierre Gorissen (organised this event)
Sybilla Poortman
Gerard Bierens
Frank Benneker
Margreeth van den Bergh
Partick Klaassen
Sebastian Fuchs
Ton Zijlstra
and me of course
BlogWalk Five
Since we were joining the workshop from Howard Rheingold, we only had an afternoon of discussion in a BlogWalk session. Since there were only eight participants it wasn't necessary to split into groups and do an open space session. This time we discussed all together on mobile blogging. The notes I've taken pretty much sums up what we've been discussing. I added the last pointers since last time I blogged them from Umea. Although we were with so few I think we did some really good work on unraveling the term mobile blogging. We came up with several lists for motivations for mobile blogging, requirements for moblogging and the tools we need to be able to moblog. The list with tools isn't completed yet, but we're planning on discussing that a little further in the virtual world. Stephanie came up with a great idea to meet up in Traveler, an on line virtual space in which you can talk to each other via voice using a 3D environment and avatars. We're trying to meet with the same group as during BlogWalk and see whether it's a good way to virtually communicate in a group and be able to pick up where we left in the face-to-face meeting. I installed the program yesterday and you need only half an hour to get used to it and get comfortable with the environment. A very interesting experiment I think!
To me it was very worthwhile to come all the way to Umea. Meeting Rheingold was very interesting, I enjoyed the afternoon BlogWalk session, I loved the clean smell of winter and seeing a tiny bit of Swedish culture. A big thanks for Stephanie for letting us stay at her place and for getting us up there!
Meeting Howard Rheingold (2)
This has been quite an experience. Flying over 2000 kilometres up north, just for meeting other bloggers in Umea, Sweden. Some last minute shopping at Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam) to prepare for expected coldness turned out to be very useful. I probably wouldn't have survived the wind on our first night up there without my newly bought winter hat. The weather turned out to be OK though, which resulted in a pleasant surprise: seeing the northern light (see the photograph in my photoblog). Anyway, now it's time to reflect a bit on the past few days.
The seminar of Howard Rheingold was the main reason for Stephanie Hendrick to invite us over to HumLab, Umea University. I think most people know who he is, but if you don't check out his personal website. I must say the seminar was not that interesting to me. As a blogger most of the things he told last thursday were already known to me, something in common with the other bloggers around I guess. One term Rheingold uses is very interesting: collective action. New communication technologies make it possible for people to connect to each other and communicate which can lead to group forming. An example he gave was the use of SMS in the Philippines to gather people in black clothes at a certain place to demonstrate. The thing we must keep in mind that these collective actions will not all be democratic and peaceful. Smartmobs can be riots as well!
During the seminar Rheingold talked about reputation building through peer-to-peer web pages, e.g. e-bay with its reputation building of sellers. A question that popped into my mind whether this peer-to-peer reputation building will improve overall quality of live. Linking this development to Habermas' ideal speech situation, acting truthfully is one of the most important things in human communication. If sellers on e-bay act untruthfully (by selling crap for large amount of money) that will show up on their record. In that respect it might be a good way to filter 'bad' people out of the system. But I can imagine that it could also be used to give bad reviews on competitors without actually buying stuff. I must honestly say I haven't bought anything through sites like e-bay so I have no eperience what actually happens on those sites. Living in a city with all stores in walking distance it's faster and easier for me to buy things in the traditional stores (OK, not cheaper, but at least I've never had any problems returning products with deficiencies).
The workshop the next morning with Howard Rheingold was supposed to be more interactive, but somehow there was only little interaction and already over before I even realized it (but maybe that's because it was interesting). A few interesting things that came about:
- Rheingold showed us how he starts his working day by skimming through blogs and other information resources. The title of blogpost is the most important factor in the decision of reading the post or not. This is a thing I never realized before, though I'm skimming through my RSS-feeds exactly in that manner. I didn't give titles that much thought up until now, but I certainly will in the future.
- Human beings are social beings that will communicate with others in order to socialize. New communication technologies support the need for socializing, but they will transform existing social networks
- Most technology is developed in terms of the developer and not in terms of the end user. During the introduction Howard mentioned that most blogging software is developed by users, e.g. to be able to publish easily on the internet. A huge research area lies within the user perspective of technology in my view. Too often they've been neglected.
All in all it was interesting to meet Howard Rheingold. I really need to read his books!
BlogWalk Notes
My blogwalk notes thusfar of this afternoon : http://blogwalk.interdependent.biz/wikka.php?wakka=NotesElmine
Meeting Howard Rheingold
Yesterday and today I'm in the fortunate position to hear Howard Rheingold speak and meet him personally at Humlab, Umea University. As a part of BlogWalk we've got a workshop with him, discussing all kinds of interesting things about the virtual world and connecting people through communication technologies. More to come today, including pictures.
ICT and education
This week my little project 'Blog in the classroom' will start. I've made a short questionnaire for the students to answer, just to get some input of their current behavior and expectations of the project. I'm curious what the outcome will be. I'm glad I started this project with my father, especially after reading an article in NRC Handelsblad, a Dutch newspaper. In this article Alette van Doggenaar describes some of the problems schools have with the use of ICT in their educational programs. All schools in The Netherlands (that means primary and secondary schools) have the infrastructure, hard- and software to be able to use it during classes. One of the complaints of teachers is that they lack expertise to integrate ICT in their classes. I can imagine that there is a whole group of teachers that didn't grow up with computers as their students do. There probably is a large group of teachers that has only a few years left before their retirement and therefore reluctant to have anything to do with computers. Although this is a big problem now, in a few years that group will not be the problem anymore. I think the biggest problem will be the generation that finished their education just before higher education started using ICT. That is the generation now in their late thirties and up. They never learned to experiment with computers, they had to teach themselves how to use the internet and e-mail. It is a generation that probably hasn't got a clue what parts a computer exists of, which results in scandals like recently when a public prosecutor thought that his computer (containing work related material) was broke and threw it out with the trash not knowing the data on the hard drive were available to anyone who'd pick up the computer, like the taxi driver that did. This is the generation in education that has to teach students to use ICT, while the younger generation they face is bullying each other through chat and no longer on the playground. I think the teachers are right when they say they lack the expertise.
One other problem with using ICT is that buying computers is not enough. The people have to be willing to use the things that are available. But that doesn't come automatically. You have to think in what ways you can integrate ICT in your classes. Experiment with it and see what tends to work and what not. That phase of experimenting doesn't seem to happen at a large scale in this country. What I read between the lines in the article is that teachers still think 'in class'. Teachers have to reserve a special computer classroom to be able to do something on the computer with their students. In my view that's were it goes wrong. One of the biggest strengths of ICT is that you don't have to meet f-t-f anymore with your students to explain problems, collect essays or whatever you'd like to use it for. In my project the students only have two hours of real f-t-f contact with my father to discuss problems in class. The rest of the week they have to work on their own. I think it would be very convenient for students when they don't have to wait for that specific hour to ask their questions, but can do it (in the case of this experiment) in a weblog. Maybe I'm proven wrong by the end of this school year, but it is all about a change of mindset. You don't always need expensive software, often developed for the sake of development and very static, to integrate ICT with your classes. Use it in the way the students use it already: a quick and easy way to communicate with each other. In my view teachers aren't creative enough, but maybe that's a problem on a more national scale: Dutch are not that creative with little resources. They always tend to say: that would be a nice idea, but it's gonna cost us and we don't have the money. BE CREATIVE!
Breaking news
It appears that the most controversial filmmaker of The Netherlands, Theo van Gogh, has been murdered this morning. Recently he made a (controversial to some) movie called Submission about Muslim women, together with Hirshi Ali. She is a politician originally from Somalia that strikes against the suppression of women by the Islam. I'm shocked that he's been killed!
